The USC doesn't work - I tried with #moat

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I did my best with my impoverished kit to record what happened last night. A manhunt was going on near to our neighbourhood (my friends were up there buying a combine harvester at lunchtime and had phoned me to ask for directions from Google Maps as the sat nav couldn't find the postcode). Therefore, I had a very close interest in the area yesterday.

The connection I was on at the time, which I managed to record at 1.96Mbps down and a mere 400kbps up, ie the proposed USC, ***FAILED*** utterly to cope with today's apps.

This blog post can be read at http://5tth.blogspot.com


This was the speed test I did yesterday before the story became what it did.

I then proceeded to try and watch the unfolding of the #moat gate drama. Without turning on a TV.

If you follow me on Twitter, you will see I posted links to the Real Radio interview with Gazza, talked about 5Live radio, was blatantly watching Sky News HD (I do not have a Sky pot), and was also trying to watch BBC News 24 whilst listening to Real Radio and others to get the latest news. Online, on the above connection. It took all of my ingenuity.....

I think that the above would be a fairly standard news consumption for a major breaking news story. I'm not a journalist. Just a person who spent hours as a baby and adult nr the River Coquet, and who had friends who unwittingly found themselves in the vicinity. Or who was interested. There were THOUSANDS of people on twitter, radio stations, TV etc who could claim that level of interest or more last night.

I do NOT have a video of the farce that was the 2Mbps connection when I tried to stream Sky, BBC News and Radio5, real radio etc, but I do have a video of much earlier in the day. No-one could accuse me of trying to push the connection to the limits (which perhaps you might like to argue I was later on in the night, as a standard consumer endeavouring to follow a breaking story on my doorstep).

All I can say is this:

If you think 2Mbps in a rural area will work, it bloody won't. And if you think FTTC will work, then you have failed to understand what WE, the people, intend to do in the future....if a story like this breaks on my doorstep, and I am drowning in journos screwing up the mobile network, then I'll be uploading this to citizentube.com over my own fat pipe (not a limited one) in full HD cos my iphone can do that TODAY. And it won't be over the mobile network unless it needs to be.

(P.S. Please note: it has taken me nigh on an hour and a half (2 now) to write this blog post because of the uploads that should have taken about 5-8 mins on a decent connection. No wonder my productivity as an SME is dropping..... I am still battling the video upload, it may turn up later - UGH) Please come back and watch it.

UPDATE: Finally.


Right, I make no apologies for the failure of my Nokia N97 to record off a screen. It doesn't work full stop but I can't afford to replace it. But, ALL that was running at the time was Sky News and this is how a 2Mbps connection coped. Buffer, buffer, buffer. It's all many of us see on iplayer etc every single day.

Then, add in all that I tried to do later on in the evening with 2 TV feeds, 3 radio feeds, Tweetdeck plus Twitter and ongoing web searches for news. #FAIL

This is NOTHIING. I should have been playing bingo, uploading the videos from the kids' school play, watching the other parent's contributions from the play, following Facebook updates to see why sprog 1 hadn't come home yet, etc etc. As Well.

I can't do that on my Friday night connection - do you think I should just be watching Big Brother? GTFOOH.

Think FTTC will cope? Put FTTC into my cabinet and let's see what my rural neighbours and I can do on a totally unlimited connection that you, Mr Ian Livingstone, believe will give us access to new applications..... I'm quite content with the old ones right now, but happy to explore, so bring it on! I'll break it quite happily after last night as soon as you do.